Web forum whose leaked user database later documented how several organisations formed.
Iron March was a web forum that operated from 2011 until 2017. In November 2019 its database was published anonymously online. Researchers who examined it, including Bellingcat and analysts writing in Lawfare in February 2020, describe roughly 195,000 posts and 22,000 private messages from about 1,200 registered users, and document that several organisations — among them Atomwaffen Division, formed in 2015 — were founded and recruited for through the site.
The characterisations of the forum and its users in this entry are those researchers’, not this project’s. The leaked corpus is the primary evidence for what took place on the site; Bellingcat’s own guidance cautions that the data is incomplete and that attribution of individual accounts is not straightforward.
The forum’s activity was continuous across its lifetime, so no single date marks a consolidation. This entry carries year-only precision for 2016, a year within that span; the leak that made the record available came three years later.